I have to admit I'm kind of disappointed! I believe the whole Bible is absolute truth - I made a decision to believe that when I chose to put my trust in God, which is why I get excited if evidence comes up to support that, naturally. But the thing I feel the MOST is just angry and sad that there are Christians out there who lie and manipulate. Jemma wondered if they weren't necessarily setting out to manipulate and deceive deliberately, but even so, it's just so saddening to me. How on earth can that be okay with them, if they truly have their hearts set on God?!?! How does that glorify God, or please Him at all? Never mind if they thought it would be to "help" God's cause - it DOESN'T!!! Manipulating or fabricating the truth is just NOT right with God, and ultimately will do the opposite of glorifying God, and a Christian should be all about glorifying and pleasing God. It just makes me so angry and sad all at the same time.
Neil and I stumbled across the original article on the fossil about 10 minutes before I posted here about it, and had never heard about it before. I guess that's a lesson learnt for me - next time I will not so innocently believe that just because someone is a Christian they are telling the truth, ugh. I'll look into it further BEFORE being so excited that I blurt it out here first! ;)
Emma asked me a few questions which I haven't got much time to answer but I'll give it a quick go! :)
I think I probably seem less open-minded and questioning as a Christian than I used to because I am becoming more settled and comfortable with what I believe. I am also settling into a deeper relationship with God than I have had before. A LOT is changing within me over this past year or so. Every now and then Neil and I talk about it, because I'm so aware of things CHANGING for me, in my heart and mind mostly. I guess that sounds vague, but to quickly grab a few examples - my view of motherhood has been changing, and I am so much more comfortable where I am in my role. I do not desperately clutch for "me time" any more, which used to be something I needed so very often, and I probably used to write about that a fair bit in my diary too. No longer. I don't feel the need for "me time" any more, specifically because God is showing me His heart for my role as a mother, and changing MY heart about it. I am less selfish than I once was, in my heart attitudes (don't get me wrong though, I still have a LONG way to go!). Also in terms of respecting and submitting to my husband. I have a LONG way to go there too! ;) It feels inside like I have been "tough" clay for so long, and now I feel that clay softening. It feels better. Sort of like a muscle that's tired of being taut all the time, and has that comfy zingy feel of a used muscle that's relaxing. I know that's a weird analogy. But my mindsets on life that gave me so much stress, they are softening and changing, purely due to God opening my eyes to some stuff, and enabling me to embrace it.
Most of all my absolute trust and confidence in God is deepening, deepening, deepening, like a pebble that has plopped into reeeeally deep water and it's still sinking down and down. It's so very freeing and comfortable to TRUST God, and not hold stuff back. I didn't even know about areas that I was holding back from him until the last year or two. I have really had a lot of big stuff revealed to me by God over the last year or so, and giving it over to God has transformed my heart and mind, and softened and deepened and matured my walk with God. I don't mean to talk myself up, just to explain how it feels to me when I think back over it and try to put it into words. There are still plenty of areas of my life that I am having trouble giving over to God completely, and so I remain pretty wretched actually! ;) But anyway, that's what I mean - things have really been changing, and I have been putting my trust in God more and more, and feeling so much happier and stronger, and more settled and comfortable in myself and in my beliefs and values. More confident too. It's all good stuff! :) So I can see why to long-term readers I might appear to be more "set in my ways" and not questioning stuff so much. It's the HUGE amount of questioning that I've been doing that is gradually leading me to the answers I sought, and I am beginning to settle into my beliefs and feel confident in them more than I used to. I don't think that's a bad thing :)
Also the big thing about dinosaurs for me is just that I believe the Bible when it said that God created everything at the start. So, not dinosaurs first and then millions of years later, humans. Or anything like that (never mind the whole humans evolving thing, which I also don't believe because I trust in what the Bible says that God created humans right at the beginning). So if evidence ever came up to prove that humans and dinosaurs really did live at the same time, then yes, I WOULD be very excited about that! ;) There are other bits of evidence that do exist, but I'm not going to blog about those till I've checked them out a bit more - learned my lesson! ;)
Emma's last question was about what my grandparents think about us homeschooling, because I was really not looking forward to telling them about it a while back, since they seemed pretty opposed to it. They are teachers and have both had long careers. Grandoug was a headmaster for a long time and then a university lecturer even when I was a teenager. The WHOLE family is full of teachers actually! All my grandparents (except Grandaddy who was a doctor), my auntie (I only have one!), and both my parents. Daddy taught music at a primary school for some years. My mum was a P.E. teacher at secondary school level, for her whole career, between having children. So to NOT do the school thing is totally alien to any of them, lol! None of my family are Christians so they don't get the "God" part of it either. Which doesn't help my cause! ;)
Thankfully it went okay after all. I reached a stage where I felt suddenly confident in my ability to pull it off (homeschooling, that is!) and that made it much easier to tell them. I had answers to all their questions and felt at ease saying them which probably helped their confidence about it too. They hadn't listened to me before when I'd told them I was already teaching Arthur to read (earlier in the year), so now to tell them he's reading and he's progressing well and enjoying the daily lessons that we do, seemed to surprise and impress them. I told them we had a maths curriculum coming in the post and I explained the other subjects we'd be studying, and what the littler boys would be doing. I told them what time of day we'd devote to school time. Granny seemed pretty upbeat and interested when I talked it through with her, which was a relief! :)
My parents are very supportive of our homeschooling, actually! :) I had a nightmare time at school some of the time (well, most of it really) and they had stress over it too, therefore. Nothing seemed well suited to me and they were constantly trying to make it better, or fit my needs, or try to express this to my teachers, etc. I think that is why they are happy for me to teach my own children because then I (nor my children, for that matter) will ever have to deal with that kind of situation. Their learning is individually tailored to them, and there couldn't be a teacher with a greater interest in getting it exactly right for them than me. So I think that's why they are very supportive.
My brother is very interested in what we're doing, asks a lot of questions, and wants me to keep him posted about it all the time. I wonder if he may be questioning the idea with Sarah for their children in the future? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and I haven't actually asked them directly, so I don't know. But he's supportive and interested. Did I say here yet that they're expecting a baby?!?! I can't believe I haven't yet - aaargh! They have sweet little Thea, who is 2 and a half. And a new baby is due in February, almost exactly when Nathan was due! How exciting!!!! :D
Neil's family seem somewhat skeptical, but ask interested questions about homeschooling. They're polite about it, at least! :) Neil's mum was quite dubious at first, but then a family moved over from the States and joined her church and they homeschool, and suddenly getting to know them means that she's understanding the benefits of homeschooling and is now very supportive of us doing it (yay!). Neil's brother was always very neutral about it to us, but when he came over last and he was talking to Arthur about something, he said afterwards that he was so impressed with what Arthur knew about things beyond his years, and that he had been unsure about homeschooling, but talking to Arthur made him change his mind! He's excited for us now! :)
So all in all, we're blessed to have a pretty supportive family when it comes to homeschooling! :)
Arthur is still loving school, and it's an absolute joy for me! I am falling more in love with it each week! I have to prepare school every evening but Friday and Saturday evenings, and sometimes that takes up a good chunk of my evening, but I LOVE doing it! :) Arthur is on Lesson 45 out of 100 in his reading lessons, and his most recent learnings have been question marks, quotation marks, and recognising sentences. He reads the words mostly without sounding them out first now, although I do still have to stop him and get him to sound out any words that he guesses in order to read faster! ;) He hates to slow down! To give an example of what he's doing at the moment in his lessons - today's reading for Arthur was this:
"he has no feet. he has no nose. he has no teeth. he is not a cow. and he is not a cat. is he a rat? no. he is not a rat." (it was a worm!)
He does word reading and sounds practise (and sometimes word rhyming) before getting to the short story at the end of the lesson. He hasn't done all the different sounds yet, nor capital letters. Punctuation is a new thing that was introduced maybe 5 or 6 lessons ago. He is loving it!
We've only done 10 lessons of his maths curriculum so far, so it's still early days, but he is really enjoying it. I am too! Examples of what he's doing so far are numbers 1-10 (seeing them in groups of 5 plus something - so 8 is 5 and 3, and 10 is 5 and 5), entering numbers on the abacus without having to count them out (number recognition), quadrilaterals, triangles, parallel and perpendicular lines and planes (!!), and writing tally marks. I LOVE LOVE LOVE his maths curriculum - Right Start Mathematics - it's wonderful! So hands on, and full of games and activities and songs and gluing and drawing and so on. I LOVE it. I also love the method. It's nothing like the method taught in schools in this country, as it's based on Asian teaching methods (specifically Japanese I think). It makes SO MUCH SENSE!! Next lesson, one of the new things he'll do is working with geoboards to make geometric shapes with rubber bands. I love it! :)
Bible study is going well with the boys too. Matthew doesn't appear to take much in and doesn't have much of an attention span either, but that's okay. He sticks around and sometimes draws next to me while I read it. Arthur seems to be REALLY taking it in, asking questions, and understanding all that I'm reading him (going by the answers he gives to the questions I ask him). I'm using the book 'Leading Little Ones to God' and I soooo highly recommend it! It's a bit old fashioned, but there's nothing wrong with that. We don't know the hymns to sing but I substitute them with songs we do know that fit the lesson's theme, or if I don't have a good substitute then I sing the words of the suggested hymn to a tune that fits the words! :)
Aaaah it's getting so late and I've ended up posting a HUGE entry after all! I must must must go to bed! There's more to write about what we're doing at school, but I'll have to write about it another time. I'll leave you with a sweet funny thing that I overheard today - I already posted it at Facebook for those of you who know me there, but I loved it so much that I want to post it here too, for prosperity! :)
Arthur wanted me to draw him a digger to colour in. He begged me for an HOUR and finally I had a moment and drew him one. He spent an hour colouring it in, and he did it sooo neatly! I haven't seen him colour like that before. He didn't go outside the lines once, and there were no gaps in the colouring. He was ever so pleased with his work. After a while, Matthew came to sit at the school table next to him and leaned on his elbows watching Arthur colour. When he saw how well Arthur was doing, he gasped in amazement and said, "Arthur, you're a GENENUS!" which he has been saying quite a bit lately (genius, that is!) to people when they do something like find the last jigsaw piece! Anyway, Arthur continued colouring and didn't look up, but he said casually, "Thanks Math. Well, it's just that I've been practising for years and years...." by way of explanation! ;) Hahaha! Funny little boys! :)
Okay, bed! But I'll be back again soon! :)
